Discovery of Ethereum Topology Through Active Probing Approach

Abstract

The Ethereum network uses Kademlia, a well-known P2P network, which allows the search for new nodes, and the change of connection with neighboring nodes. The Ethereum network must cope with security attacks such as DDoS attacks, 51% attacks, and Sybil attacks, and scalability issues, which slows down the transaction processing speed per second (TPS) as the network expands. A deep analysis of the dynamically changing topology and the connection between the nodes constituting the topology is needed to solve these problems. Therefore, in this paper, we measure the topology in the Ethereum network using a passive probing data collection to search for active nodes in the network and an active probing method to check the activity of nodes participating in the Ethereum network. Our results give a clear insight into the topology properties and topology visualization.